Hi. My name is Jaymes…and I’m an addict.
That’s how I learned to introduce myself when I had moved to Seattle and was encouraged by a friend to attend my first recovery meeting. My attendance didn’t last long and neither did my sobriety. A lot of years have passed since that first meeting and I found myself leaving Seattle for Salt Lake City, Utah, which then took me to Boulder, Colorado under the pretense that I would eventually be given an opportunity to open a business location for my employer in Chicago. There…all caught up.
The truth is that I have always had a very passionate personality which often times manifests itself through addiction. Basically, if I end up enjoying something or something helps me bury my depression a little bit deeper so I don’t have to deal with it, I dive in head first. And by the time I make my way here to the second city, I am fully invested in my vices.
And last summer I finally broke.
I get sent away for six weeks to deal with the chemical shock of detoxing and begin to repair my mental state from a self-imposed isolation from the outside world. Simply put, I was pretty messed up.
When I get back to Chicago my best friend and my boss both showed up to help me settle back in and just make sure that I was stable enough to get to some kind of normal routine. And this is how I discovered Titan Gym.
My boss had been going to Krav Maga gym in Colorado for a few years and he kept telling me I needed to try this as an alternative to my favorite past times. Basically, he wasn’t going to leave Chicago until I had signed up for at least a free trial class somewhere. This began a google search of martial arts gyms, boxing gyms and Krav Maga gyms. We sat on the couch passing the computer back and forth talking about different pragmatics and we kept coming back to Titan’s website. The truth is that I was terrified about trying this. I like control, and this felt like I would have none of it. But 48 hours later, I’m walking into Titan on a Monday evening with a complete deer-in-the-headlights look…and I end up having a blast.
Along with all the garbage of my life, there is also a lot of insecurity and anger to accompany my perpetual sense of sadness. Especially now that I am learning how to navigate life as a person trying to be better. And that is ultimately what I appreciate and value most at Titan Gym.
There is a safety in coming to this gym where I feel like every time I step on to that mat and I carry on all of my shit, I’m given a chance to leave a little bit more of it there. I walk away realizing that in spite of the reality that there are really horrible things that can come up in our lives, there is a strength in our humanness that can be channeled and teach us that we have the ability to fight our way through it. Sometimes, like Ivo says, it’s about hitting the killswitch and having to go in to fight off whatever is coming at us…other times it may just be about putting your hands up and creating some distance so whoever (or whatever) is threatening our well-being realizes that it’s not in their best interest to mess with us anymore.
I have realized that every person who comes to Titan can have very different reasons for attending. But in the end what we are all grateful for is the space and investment of the people here that help us manifest and realize whatever we are trying to discover about ourselves.
